Now we have Broadband ( megabit - millions of bits a second)
via wires or wireless and use of digital mobile telephone systems.. and
even Gigabit (thousands of millions bits a second) - This means much
more information, and more types of information can be moved around quickly.

How did it begin?

The Internet began as a Cold War project to create a communications
network that was immune to a nuclear attack.
In the 1969, the U.S. government created ARPANET, connecting four
western universities and allowing researchers to use the mainframes of
any of the networked institutions.
New connections were soon added to the network, bringing the number of
"nodes" up to 23 in 1971, 111 in 1977, and up to almost 4 million in 1994.
As the size of the network grew so did its capabilities: In its first 25
years, the Internet added features such as file transfer, email, Usenet
news, and eventually HTML.

Present

Key Features of the modern Internet:

Common Protocol: (rules of communication) on all machines.
Different computers and devices made by different manufacturers could
"talk" to each other. - TCP/IPDynamic routing of Information: Chop up the information into
chunks (packets) If the route is closed one way, send the packet via
another route ! - Bomb proof.
See this simple animation :http://www.pbs.org/opb/nerds2.0.1/geek_glossary/packet_switching_flash.htmlIP addresses Internet computer nodes and routers on the Internet
are identified by unique IP addresses:
IPV4 = four numbers, each from 0 to 255. e.g. 178.24.113.21
Total of 4,294,967,296 addresses. But large blocks of addresses are
reserved for special uses and are unavailable for public allocation.
Despite tricks to enable one number to serve several nodes, (Network
Address Translation) we are running out of numbers! Hence IPV6 which has
eight hexadecimal numbers (each number up to 65535) = and more than
7.9×(ten to the 28) times as many IP numbers as IPv4.
(more than there are grains of sand on all the beaches of the world)
The two systems are completely different and we are still mostly using
IPV4 in 2013, though IPV6 was launched in 2012.
Test your IPV6 connectivity: http://test-ipv6.com/DNS - Domain Name Service Translates addresses of web sites (words)
into their IP addresses (numbers). A DNS Server - is a computer on the
Internet which processes part of this service - the system has to query
three types of name-server in turn, the answer to each query refining
the search.
See video : http://youtu.be/72snZctFFtA